Oprah interviews Pico Iyer for Super Soul Sunday under the oak trees in her backyard. In this upcoming episode, Oprah shares an insight in Iyer’s TED Book that led her to “the biggest aha of my life.” Photo: Courtesy of OWN

On this weekend’s episode of Super Soul Sunday, Oprah Winfrey asks TED Books author Pico Iyer to explain more precisely what he means by the word ‘stillness.’ It’s not so much about meditation, he says. “It’s sanity and it’s balance, and it’s a chance to put things in perspective,” he says.

Like so many others, Iyer has noticed that constant motion — running from one meeting to another, keeping a packed social calendar, bouncing with the constant pings of emails — has become a norm. Underneath a pair of oak trees in Oprah’s backyard, the two dig deeper into the ideas in Iyer’s book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, and its accompanying TED Talk. They parse how to find little moments of pause in an on-demand world.

“A big luxury for so many people today is a little blank space in the calendar where you collect yourself,” Iyer says in a preview clip. “I’ve got time to take care of my body, why am I not taking care of my spirit?”

Tune in on Sunday, March 8, to OWN at 11am EST to hear this conversation in full and find out what Oprah calls the “biggest aha of my life” in the preview below. We’re dying to know what it is too.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/pico-iyer-inspires-oprah-to-have-the-biggest-aha-of-my-life/feed/1Pico Iyer and OprahkatetedOprah interviews Pico Iyer for Super Soul Sunday under the oak trees in her backyard. In this upcoming episode of the show, Oprah shares an insight in Iyer's TED Book that led her too "the biggest aha of my life." Photo: Courtesy of OWNBrene Brown interviewed by Oprah in a two-part episode of “Super Soul Sunday”http://blog.ted.com/brene-brown-interviewed-by-oprah-in-a-two-part-episode-of-super-soul-sunday/
http://blog.ted.com/brene-brown-interviewed-by-oprah-in-a-two-part-episode-of-super-soul-sunday/#commentsWed, 20 Mar 2013 21:30:21 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=73487[…]]]>

On Sunday, Oprah Winfrey revealed that she and TED speaker Brené Brown are “soul mates.”

“As someone who studies shame and scarcity and fear, if you asked me, ‘What is the most terrifying, difficult emotion we experience as humans?,’ I would say joy,” says Brown. “When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding.
Brené Brown: Listening to shame
So what we do in moments of joyfulness is we try to beat vulnerability to the punch … We try to dress-rehearse tragedy.”

In fact, says Brown during the first part of this intervie, fear seems to be an ever-present part of our experience.

“I think there’s a thin film of terror wrapped around us,” says Brown. “If it’s not, ‘I’m not safe enough’ or ‘I’m not secure enough,’ it’s ‘I’m not liked enough,’ ‘I’m not promoted enough,’ ‘I’m not loved enough’ … at the very bottom, ‘I’m not good enough.’”